There's another issue - according to experts in preservation of this media and experts in preservation, there is no possible way for them to have actually converted the tapes anywhere remotely near that quickly, so presumably they simply threw the tapes out.
Tape reading and writing is very VERY slow. Even with the newer tapes it's still quite a bit slower. But tapes are way better for archival purposes as well as cost per TB. There's archive drives but they're way more expensive. So they probably used a standard drive. 10 years (maybe) vs 30.
or just gave them to Palantir to lease the data back to us while using it for whatever purposes they or their clients see fit (including training AI models on data nobody else can get)
Palantir is not simply an AI company, and many formats of these “old” tapes remain in active use today. they are a very cost efficient way to store huge volumes of data on an affordable medium. many (most?) archival services use them as part of a redundant backup or long-term storage system.
This is just another example of something that worries me greatly: most people in charge of the world are utterly tech-ignorant. They simply do not understand how things work. So when they hear something like this they'll just believe it.
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lol bluesky is a special place